Instructional design

How this module was designed

Most training is handed over finished, and the thinking that shaped it stays with whoever built it. This is that thinking, for a module you can work through in seven minutes.

Try the module first

I’ve published this for two reasons. If you are considering commissioning training, the design decisions are what you would actually be buying - the finished module is just what they produce. And if you build learning material yourself, some of this may be useful whether or not we ever work together.

Who it is for

Practice managers, receptionists and CSRs, RVTs, assistants, and veterinarians - a genuinely mixed room, which is the first real design problem. In many practices the same person covers several of those roles in a single day.

Four decisions came out of that:

The scenario is set at the front desk, not in the exam room. Almost every communication resource I can find assumes a veterinarian in a consulting room. But “what would you do?” is very often asked at the desk or on the phone, while someone else is waiting to be served. That moment is under-supported, and it is where the module belongs.

No clinical knowledge is required to answer correctly. Every recommended response can be given by someone with no medical training at all. That is a constraint, and it is also the point - the skill being taught does not depend on knowing the medicine.

It has to work cold. No facilitator, no prerequisites, one sitting, for someone who started last week. Turnover in this sector is real and training that only works when delivered live does not survive it.

It has to be short. Six to eight minutes. A clinic team does this between appointments or it does not do it at all.

One objective, written so it can be observed

By the end of this module you will be able to respond to a client who asks “what would you do?” in a way that gives them real support without taking the decision away from them - and recognise the two ways that response usually goes wrong.

Objectives written as “understand” or “be aware of” cannot be assessed, which means the training built on them cannot be evaluated either. If someone is paying for training, they should be able to tell afterwards whether it worked.

And there is one objective, not four. A seven-minute module claiming four objectives is not serious about any of them.

What makes this genuinely hard

The whole module rests on a single observation:

They are not asking you to choose. They are asking whether it is allowed.

The question sounds like a request for an opinion. It is usually a request for permission, or for someone to share the weight of it for a moment. Answer the question that was literally asked, and it goes wrong in one of two directions.

Abandonment. “It’s your decision.” “Only you can know.” True, professionally correct, and often taught as the safe answer. It lands as a door closing. The person asked precisely because they cannot hold it alone.

Appropriation. “If she were mine, I’d be ready.” Kind in the moment, and it produces immediate visible relief - which is exactly why people reach for it. But the decision now carries your name. When the doubt arrives weeks later, what the client remembers is that the clinic told them to.

The response that works sits between those two, and it has three beats: acknowledge, give what you actually can, and hand it back with somewhere to go. Only the middle beat changes with your role, which is what lets one module serve a whole team. The third beat is the one people skip, and it is the one doing the work.

Why a branching scenario, and not slides

The skill here is a judgment call made under pressure, with no correct script. A knowledge check can establish whether someone remembers three beats. Only a scenario can show whether they choose well in the moment where choosing is hard - and the moment is hard precisely because the wrong answers feel kind.

Wrong answers are not punished. There is no score, no buzzer, and no forced retry. Each choice shows its realistic consequence - the client’s actual reaction - before any explanation, and then the module continues. Two reasons for that. Adults disengage from training that makes them feel caught out. And this particular audience is being asked to look at a moment many of them will feel they have handled badly before, which is a fragile place to start scoring people.

Each decision point is built the same way: one clearly best response, and three plausible wrong ones drawn from what people actually say. None of the wrong answers are strawmen. Two of them are what most communication training recommends.

What was deliberately left out

This is usually the more revealing half of a design.

Quality-of-life frameworks. The Five Freedoms and the Five Domains are directly relevant to this conversation, and they are not in this module. At the second decision point, handing the client a welfare framework is exactly the failure the module is teaching against - she has just described what she is seeing, and she is not short of a model. She is short of permission. Introducing a framework there would contradict the lesson at the moment the learner is watching most closely. It belongs in its own module, taught properly.

The veterinarian’s dialogue. The veterinarian is referred to and never quoted. I work in the space between veterinary medicine and registered counselling, and I do not put words in either profession’s mouth - including in training material, where it would be easy and where nobody would notice.

A completion score. Nothing is recorded, graded, or reported. The final knowledge-check question is deliberately not machine-marked: it asks the learner to think about where their own limit sits, then shows a model answer. Some things should be considered rather than clicked, and a module that pretends otherwise is inflating its own completion statistics.

How it closes

After the scenario, the module replays the whole exchange as a single transcript with each of the three beats labelled - the shape of the thing, complete, after the learner has already worked out the pieces under pressure. Then it shows the learner their own three choices beside it.

That comparison is the assessment. Not a percentage: a chance to see what you said next to what works, and to notice for yourself where they diverged.

Delivery

It runs in a browser, on a phone or a desktop, with no login, no plugin, and no learning management system required. It is keyboard navigable and readable at the same text sizes as the rest of this site. For a clinic, that means it can be sent as a link, opened at the front desk between appointments, and finished.

It can also be delivered into a practice’s own education portal, badged as the practice’s own, with your referral information in place of mine.